Interactive conversation systems (ICS) are becoming more important as tools to educate, entertain, and inform. For example, medical school students may practice their diagnosing skills utilizing ICS without the need to interact with real patients. School children may have one-on-one conversations with leading historical and modern figures, such as Senator John Glenn, providing an opportunity that would not otherwise exist.
However for such educational and informative systems to be of real value, the system should impart believability. A user should believe that she is interacting with an actual person, so that the computer display screen falls away and the user arrives at a state of suspension of disbelief. Of course, systems using computer-generated characters, such as “avatars” as the subject, are generally unable to generate this suspension of disbelief. Even prior art systems utilizing video of human subjects often fall short in maintaining that suspension of disbelief by failing to promptly respond to questions or statements by the user. Lags in computational time, retrieval of images from storage, and poor programming algorithms may cause a hesitation between when a question is asked and when it is answered. ICS that utilize generic off-the-shelf speech recognition engines without additional enhancement often fall prey to this problem. Thus, the effect resembles talking to a computer character on the other side of the planet, instead of a real person right in front of the user, destroying the believability of the system.
In addition, ICS are often programmed to provide a video clip in response to a question from the user. However, these video clips may not segue into each other in a smooth fashion. They may cause an initial jerk in the character's position from a previous position; or, and perhaps worse, they may leave a character at the end of a video clip in an awkward position, e.g., with their head at an uncomfortable tilt or their mouth open. This “jump cut” or “rough cut” position also may destroy the believability of the system. Prior art systems may attempt to eliminate the jump cut by morphing the character's image between video clips. Morphing transforms a first character image to a second character image by generating a series of frames containing computer-generated character images that attempt to mimic the appearance of an actual transition. Unfortunately, morphing produces an unnatural, animated result that destroys the user's suspension of disbelief.
The present invention addresses the above problems and is directed to achieving at least one of the above stated goals.